Album Reviews

Hüsker Dü began making records in the Reagan era, and their hardcore-punk-bad-trip-psychedelia — exemplified in a white-knuckled cover of The Byrds’ “Eight Miles High” — was a perfect reflection of WTF rage at America’s right-wing hijacking. So it’s welcome and fitting to hear new music from ex-frontman Bob Mould during …

Singer-songwriter Jessica Pratt hails from California — both Southern and Northern — and her first LP pegged her as one part late-Sixties Laurel Canyon, one part early 2000s freak folk. Her style blossomed on her 2015 follow-up, On Your Own Love Again, with stranger melodies (one song is even called …

Five years ago, country singer Randy Houser was on a blissful commercial hot streak. His How Country Feels album spawned four consecutive radio hits; the title track, which came on like 1997 Shania Twain with chugging guitars and titanic drums, was a strong entry in country’s long tradition of songs …

Chris Cornell was an enigma. He could sound savage and tender at the same time. During his 52 years, he was grunge’s Golden God, a folky songsmith, a pop wailer and an easy-listening crooner. He possessed one of the most awe-inspiring voices of his generation, and possibly the greatest voice …

Since the explosion of “Radioactive” in 2012, pop-rocktronica band Imagine Dragons has been America’s excitement wallpaper. They’re the signifier of phoenix-rinsing triumph inHunger Games,Transformers, DC universe andAngry Birdsfilms; in commercials for video games, headphones and cars; for soccer, football, rugby and Wrestlemania. Their fourth album,Origins, was just released and it …

The Puerto Rican group Calle 13 are one of modern Latin music’s most-treasured institutions: Over the course of five scrappy, propulsive albums, they were aesthetically omnivorous, politically bracing and even commercially successful, earning a platinum plaque and a smattering of minor hits. Their peers adored them, and no group has …

“We are all older now, and the same things get us going,” Allison Crutchfield sings in the opening lines of Fall Into the Sun, the tour de force reunion LP from Philadelphia punk band Swearin’. After breaking up the band for several years, Crutchfield and co-singer-guitarist Kyle Gilbride, alongside drummer …

When Eric Church, with some nuance, noted his problems with the National Rifle Association ina Rolling Stone cover storyearlier this year, the internet blew up in certain troll networks. Folks figuratively spit on him, in clear ignorance of his actual words, predicting/threatening that fans would abandon him en masse. Others …

Much of the nostalgic, hyper-real sounds emerging from the current wellspring of electronic music comes from a fictional, idealized Japan: vaporwave and “future funk” artists sampling buttery, synth-centic Japanese funk and boogie records; ambient artists attempting to capture their icy Eighties New Age rarities; PC Music tweaking the exaggerated “kawaii” …

Richard Swift — a prolific sideman and producer who spooned instant-vintage stardust onto records and live performances by the Black Keys, the Shins and more — completed this gorgeous solo LP just weeks before his alcoholism-related death in July. “I don’t know if I can make it through/Every color now …